WTF in France #8 – when Hadopi lobbyists try to spam the Social Media conversations

As you may know, there’s a strong debate about Hadopi. What is that, Hadopi?

“French Internet users could soon be asked to install spyware on their PCs that tracks their surfing habits and analyzes the applications installed on their machines in order to prevent file sharing piracy. Plans for this type of surveillance surfaced this week when a paper authored by the French Hadopi agency, which was put in place to police the French Internet and prevent copyright infringement as part of the country’s three strikes legislation, leaked online.”

Officially, Hadopi aims to prevent French users from downloading illegal files. In fact, it’s utterly more subtile and Hadopi is massively perceived as a freedom-breakthrough as internet usages are massively changing:

As consumer preferences and technology change, some people in the music industry are proposing new ways to deal with piracy. For example, PRS for Music, a royalty collection agency in Britain, proposed a levy on Internet service providers, based on the amount of pirated music that passes through their networks.

The main observers declare that this law could go at the end against creation (the logics is that P2P is now like radio used to be some decades ago: a way to discover artists, and so to generate value. I go very fast on this point…).

Well, during the last few weeks, some people discoverd on microblogging platforms like Twitter that trolls were now cyber-squatting the hadopi hashtag #hadopi, in order to artificially decrease the share of voice (and so the access to the debate).

Does it really change people’s mind? No, it just generates some more excitement and fighting spirit…